"In test cricket there's a general feeling that if you win the toss you should bat," Clarke told ABC Science Online.

"But when you look at the past record, it shows that both home and away teams do better when they bat second than when they bat first."

Clarke and Allsopp analysed the results of 151 test matches between 1997 and 2001 and found that the team batting second won 49% of matches and lost only 26%. The figures do not add up to 100 because there are a lot of draws in test cricket.

"[The second-batting advantage] could be because it just so happened that the better teams always batted second," he said. But Clarke and Allsopp did some further number crunching to take this into account.

"We did quite a big regression analysis where we allowed for team ability and home advantage and we still got an advantage for the team batting second," he said.

Historical reasons

Clarke said he thinks the reasons for the bat-first dogma in five-day test cricket is historical.

"In the old days they used to have uncovered wickets and so the wickets would get weather on them," he said. "It'd rain and the wicket would start off being very good for batting but it would deteriorate through the five day test match.

"By the end of five days, the team that was batting last would be at a severe disadvantage because the wicket would be hard to play on. So teams tended to want to bat first so they could bowl last."

The new findings suggest that it's best for teams to use their superiority in batting or bowling in the last innings, said Clarke.

The researchers also found that there was no advantage to winning the toss.

"I suspect that's because captains are doing the wrong thing. They're still going on this old thing 'Oh, we win the toss, we'd better bat first'," said Clarke.